H.I.V. Prevention Starts With Sex Ed

Vickie M. Mays is a professor of psychology and health services at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Updated August 10, 2011, 5:45 PM

The unacceptably high and rising H.I.V. incidence rate in young black gay men is an old problem. It is time to move beyond blaming young black gay men for taking sexual risks, blaming the black community for stigmatizing homosexuality, blaming poverty for lack of access to medical care, and blaming everyone and everything for the lack of leadership and political will to do what is needed.

We must engage a national sex education program that encourages self-respect, reduces secrecy and stigma, and delays the start of sexual intercourse.

We must value the lives of African-Americans. Further, we must recognize that the H.I.V. epidemic among African-American gay men and heterosexual women threatens U.S. prosperity at least as much as the epidemic in sub-Saharan Africa. National Institutes of Health-sponsored research indicates new infections in African -Americans would fall if we increased educational attainment and provided skills and opportunities for jobs with livable wages — a formula that not so incidentally would make room in our society for many of the African-American men now filling our jails. We must engage a national sex education program for all young people that encourages self-respect, reduces secrecy and stigma, and delays the start of sexual intercourse.

Tragically, we lack the leadership to accomplish this. We have failed to incorporate sex education into health education, because we have stretched the right to sexual privacy to mean sexual education is not a public concern. We find it easier to blame African-American gay men for living on the “down low” than to create culturally specific and effective solutions that address their needs. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has spent years promoting efforts to adapt interventions designed for other populations for use with young African-American gay men. These interventions are doomed to failure because they do not acknowledge the overpowering social and environmental differences facing young, gay African-American men.

The president has unveiled a national AIDS/H.I.V. strategy; he must now demonstrate the political will to allocate resources to those most at risk, without delay.